During the summer, Bellator signed a number of new fighters that will make their promotional debuts during season nine, and we wanted to highlight a few of these hungry young prospects that fans should keep an eye on starting with tonight’s event in Temecula, California.

So, without further ado, here are nine Bellator prospects to watch out for during this coming season of fights.

The first fighter to keep an eye on this season is veteran John Alessio, who has been fighting professionally since 1998. After making his name as a top prospect fighting for SuperBrawl in Hawaii, the UFC fed Alessio to the sharks when, at just 20 years of age, he fought Pat Miletich for the UFC welterweight title. And while Alessio would get tapped out in just 1:43 and leave the UFC immediately afterwards, he returned in 2006 and fought both Diego Sanchez and Thiago Alves, losing to both and losing his spot on the roster again. Never perturbed, Alessio then carved out a solid run in the WEC, MFC, Dream, and a few other promotions to get yet another crack in the Octagon in 2012, but after losing to Mark Bocek and Shane Roller — becoming the only fighter in UFC history to go 0-5 — he was cut for good. Bellator then picked him up and he’s been installed as a participant in the season nine lightweight tournament. Winning it, he says, is his destiny.

It looks like there’s once again trouble a’ brewing between UFC president Dana White and UFC HOFer/lughead Tito Ortiz. If you recall, the beef between these two got to such a boiling point back in 2007 that Spike TV aired a special hyping up a boxing match between the two (one which never came to fruition, of course). And while it seemed that White and Ortiz had repaired their relationship for long enough to have Tito get beat into retirement, Ortiz’s recent signing with Bellator has reopened the trash-talking floodgates.

Things really kicked off when Ortiz compared DW to a slave master during a recent interview with Sportscenter:

I thought slavery was over a long time ago. It’s just one of those things where you can’t trust a word the man says. And when you can’t do that, how can you work for him? When you work for a person and they’re badmouthing you no matter what, how can you work for them? When you apologize for the things that did happen and he still goes behind your back and says things about you, for no reason at all. Dana’s thing now is bullying and he is one of the biggest bullies in the business. He’s a big bully. One of these days, karma, it always come back around.

It’s hard to argue with Tito’s comparison when looking at the facts. As we all know, slaves regularly received compensation packages totalling upwards of $250,000 for their work in the fields, as well as top notch medical care whenever they came down with a bad case of “cracked skull.” In addition, it is a well known fact that all slaves drove Rolls Royces to and from their million dollar summer homes.

Being that White is slightly more aware of what gets said about him in the media than the average President of a billion dollar corporation, he responded with the vitriol of a “Ben Affleck is the new Batman” Reddit thread at the Fight Night 27 media scrum on Wednesday.

MMAJunkie passes along Bjorn Rebney’s statement on what is quickly becoming one of the most stacked cards of the year. Yup, I just wrote that:

Pat Curran’s one of the best mixed martial artists we have in the game today. Before breaking his hand, Straus was a fixture in the top 10 rankings with a huge amount of talent. Curran vs. Straus is a fight I’ve wanted to see since Daniel won the tournament a year ago last May. This should be an epic world title fight and our pay-per-view provides the perfect stage.

For some MMA fighters, professional wrestling was just a one-time cash grab. For others, it became a second career. Inspired by yet another week of TNA Impact Wrestling’s efforts to get anyone to care about the professional wrestling experiments of two broken-down MMA legends, we’ll be examining fighters who took up professional wrestling after they made their names in MMA in our newest installment of The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.

The Good

When you’re thinking of good instances of an MMA fighter turning to professional wrestling as a second career choice, Josh Barnett should immediately come to mind. There have been other fighters who dabbled in professional wrestling, but Barnett is one of the only ones to be just as popular and successful in it as he was in MMA.

Before his transition, Barnett became the youngest heavyweight champion in UFC history by defeating Randy Couture at UFC 36. After being stripped of his title due to a positive drug test, Barnett set his sights on the Japanese professional wrestling scene, where the fans value legitimacy and toughness from their wrestlers more than mic skills and charisma (although Barnett has both in spades). He immediately challenged for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, and although he came up short, he went on to enjoy the most relevant crossover career of any fighter on this list before his return to the UFC earlier this year put a halt to the wrasslin’ for the time being.

Well, we warned you. Bellator ring girl Jade Bryce has returned for another installment of “MMA Impressions” for CagePotato.com, in which she gives her own unique take on these classic victory celebrations:

Last night, Deadspin posted newly leaked footage from The Day the Clown Cried, a never-released Jerry Lewis movie about “a clown in a concentration camp who entertains Jewish children as they are led to their deaths.” That film should have never made it to production in the first place, just based on its horrific premise alone. But it was actually completed in 1972, and would have made it to theaters if the movie’s producers didn’t have the good sense to bury it. Since then, it has become one of cinema’s greatest urban legends, only viewed by a handful of Jerry Lewis’s friends.

If there is an MMA equivalent to The Day the Clown Cried, it’s this: A 2007 Spike TV special called “Bad Blood: Dana White vs. Tito Ortiz” which follows the UFC president and former light-heavyweight champion as they prepare for a three-round boxing match, which was organized only because of their mutual dislike. The premise is just as absurd, the footage is just as embarrassing, and luckily for humanity, the fight never happened.

In fact, the 90-minute special ends with the revelation that the fight isn’t happening. Ortiz fails to show up to the weigh-ins — which he claims was due to a contract dispute — and the Nevada State Athletic Commission officially cancels the proceedings. So in a way, this video is also MMA’s version of Geraldo’s visit to Al Capone’s vault, in terms of pathetic anti-climax. But in this case, we were spared an indulgent freak show on top of a serious lose-lose situation for the UFC: Either Dana White gets his ass kicked on cable TV, or a 37-year-old fight promoter out-strikes a future Hall of Famer. It wouldn’t be a good look in either scenario, and we can’t help wondering if it was all just hype in the first place.

There’s no mystery as to why Bellator is entering the fold — the pay-per-view marketplace is where the profits are for MMA promoters. Yet as Yahoo’s Kevin Iole is fond of noting in one of his latest columns, the only entity in the 20-year history of MMA that has successfully pulled off profitable pay-per-view shows has been the UFC. Merely attempting to break even with a Tito-Rampage main event might be over-reaching on Bellator’s part.

Part of what Iole writes is true, including how Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney is contradicting his previous statements about Bellator aiming to build stars from scratch rather than relying on former UFC fighters. But it is myopic of Kevin Iole to rail off biased theories about how the Bellator PPV is just a ploy in the legal drama between Bellator and Eddie Alvarez, who are feuding over the matching clause in Bellator’s contract. As Iole argues:

“Bellator also looks petty by even putting on a pay-per-view show, because it is likely just a legal maneuver in its court case with top lightweight contender Eddie Alvarez. Alvarez attempted to sign a UFC contract, but Rebney contended Bellator matched the UFC offer and that Alvarez belongs to Bellator.

That’s for a court to decide, but it’s unconscionable for Bellator officials to tie up a young athlete in the prime of his career. But Bellator, which in the suit said it planned to feature Alvarez in a pay-per-view to compete against the UFC offer, now has to go forward.”

A talented fighter like Eddie Alvarez does deserve his chance in the UFC. Unfortunately, the cream does not rise to the top, especially in the fight game: Without the right management, political maneuverings and opportunities, it simply spoils unnoticed and unheralded on the sidelines. Where Iole misses the point over both the Alvarez situation, as well as the true significance of the Bellator PPV, has to do with the context that he explains these situations occurring within.

Bellator didn’t trip over itself to find Tito Ortiz and Quinton Jackson. They just happened to be the only available and marketable MMA fighters who fit into Viacom/Bellator’s plans. Interestingly, the Eddie Alvarez situation speaks directly to the reason why so few free agents exist in MMA, because of how Alvarez’s MMA contract essentially enslaved him to his promotion.

This, of course, isn’t the case. The UFC has put on several PPVs whose main events rival Rampage-Ortiz in outright shittyness. For some reason, those PPVs didn’t draw the media’s collective derision like Rampage-Ortiz did. (It’s almost as if the mainstream MMA media is being coerced by some powerful, credential-wielding force…) But that’s OK; CagePotato is here to bring those terrible main events to justice.

So just what has the UFC given us to watch on Saturday nights that was as bad as the upcoming Rampage-Ortiz train wreck? Let’s have a look.

People might not agree with this pick, but Ortiz-Griffin II was an awful main event. By 2009, Ortiz wasn’t important enough to pay for — no matter who he was fighting. Going into the fight with Forrest Griffin, he was 1-2-1 in his last four fights, with his only win coming against Ken Shamrock in 2006. Tito’s best days were far behind him. In fact, he hadn’t beaten anyone NOT named Ken Shamrock since 2006 (and, coincidentally, it was Forrest Griffin who he beat).

Griffin, too, had whatever the opposite of “a head of steam” is going into UFC 106. Rashad Evans embarrassed him at UFC 92, taking the light heavyweight belt in the process. But what Evans did to him seemed tame compared to the legendary beat down that Anderson Silva bestowed on Griffin at UFC 101.

Put these ruts together and you get an overpriced PPV — $60 to watch two guys who would never be relevant again.

Which brings us to today’s press conference, an hour-long suckfest in which Bjorn Rebney dutifully tried to convince us that he was both a tried and true MMA fan and honestly excited about the prospect of watching the two half-asleep gentlemen sitting on either side of him fight in the near future. He tried, dammit.

Being that your time is way too valuable to spend an hour of it watching Rebney stroke two former champions egos to full completion while they both push their newfound love of the sport on us like a Ronco Rotisserie, we’ve recapped some most notable moments from yesterday’s press conference after the jump.